THE FAD DIETS and weight control

THE FAD DIETS Of the total of 40 million overweight Americans, pollsters have found, 30 million have made some attempt, however halfhearted, to control their weight, and at any one time 20 million people in this country are on some reducing diet or other. Dieting, in fact, has been called the number-one national pastime. And the dietary regimens followed are as 64 / Building General Health as Preventive Therapy numerous as they are almost incredibly bizarre and even self-defeating and health-impairing. There are magic-pair diets: lamb chops and grapefruit, eggs and spinach, or bananas and skim milk, which have their share of fanatic followers.

There are reducing formulas that concentrate on d single food -six to nine eggs a day, for example, until the chickens weight reducers beg for mercy. Crash diet formulas include grapefruit and coffee for dinner on end: celery and virtually nothing else; cottage cheese and little more: purges of lemon juice and nothing in the way of solid food. The intent has to be to make one miserable and hope to melt away a lot of time. Yet acute malnutrition and even worse may develop. Not long ago there was considerable publicity when a young New Jersey mom. In good following a crash diet, and there have been reports since of   who failed to survive similar diets. 

There are high-protein diets which, through restricting   10 steak, eggs, and other high-protein foods, are purported to reluctant any single-category diet can be dangerous because it omits. And few people actually can stick with enough anyhow to lose appreciable amounts; even those who do very often quickly return to obesity. There is an "eat fat" diet which supposedly puts the fats you work somehow melting away fat deposits in the body. But while Americans have spent millions of dollars on books advocating such, I did, there is no evidence that anyone type of food stimulates the burning off of fat stores. 

There is a low-carbohydrate diet, sometimes called the "Air I ore Diet" though the Air Force disclaims it. It calls for counting and restricting the intake of "carbohydrate units" but allows eating just about anything else you wish. But there is some possibility that restricting carbohydrates can upset both digestion and the body's fluid balance. Moreover, the diet tends to concentrate on foods high in fats, especially saturated fats, which may be harmful to the coronary arteries and the heart. When they are not out rightly dangerous, unscientific diets, however attractive they are made to sound, are self-defeating. 

While they may appear to be initially successful in taking off weight, such loss usually is the result of (1) water loss rather than loss of body fat, (2) decrease in appetite and thus caloric intake due to radical changes in eating practices, or (3) both reasons. Because they differ from family meal patterns, such diets are not acceptable for long periods-and so weight is regained once the original adultery eating habits arc resumed. And on-again-off-again dieting can be delicious.